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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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So as a taxi driver with asthma and horrific allergies, I've found dog owners are not typically terribly understanding when I tell them we're going to have another cab come pick them up. I've had several people insist that their animal is a service dog as if this somehow changes my own health condition.
I've often found that my own access to public spaces is limited by the use of service animals and straight up pets in public places. I don't even try to go to breweries anymore. I wouldn't bother trying to get on a plane. Even hotels are basically a no go for me unless i want to get sick more often than not.
I don't pretend to have a solution to this, but access to public spaces for animals and for some allergy sufferers is mutually exclusive. It makes it a lot more complicated than 'service animals should be everywhere' or 'allergy sufferers should have access to public spaces'. The two are kind of in conflict. It sucks.
Nobody pays any mind to air quality and it's made my life a whole lot more difficult than it needs to be.
Anyway, i feel for her, but i think the service animal stuff is way over simplified and people forget that other people with disabilities also pay a cost.
The fact that this blind lady needs to have both her guide dog and a taxi/rideshare to get around anywhere sucks for both her and the driver - the former for obvious reasons, and the latter for the reasons you listed out. It’s a sort-of perfect microcosm of the major issue a lot of modern cities seem to have: poor public transit and heavy car-centric infrastructure.
The unfortunate reality that she absolutely needs a car to seemingly get anywhere is the problem here. People - and not just people with disabilities, but in general - should have (and deserve) different viable options to get around. The whole idea of a person becoming stuck at their house because of not being able to get the transport they need to get around the place is fuckin atrocious and should be what’s actually talked about here, not “jUsT lEt ThE aNiMaL oN!” or “MaKe An UbEr ApP fOr PeOpLe LiKe ThIs!”
Just to add to the controversy, in a perfect world with good public transportation, how do you still accommodate both? On a train you could have an animal-free car but what about buses? You can't have a separate bus for every single accommodation.
So the thing to understand is that while well designed cities have good public transit, what they actually have better is walkability. You should be able to do most of your business without taking any transit options. This saves the disabled woman from needing to use transit and helps reduce the amount of service animals in transit.
There still needs to be some degree of mixing but there's limitations as to how protected we can make things for everyone. Some people have an airborne allergy to peanuts but we aren't going to ban peanuts everywhere to accommodate. People with severe animal allergies will have up continue finding ways to cope since we aren't going to ban people from having pets. The best we can do is what's reasonable.